


Sink Your Claws In

by folie_a_yeux



Series: Kolya and Winston [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Fun at Hannibal's Expense, Gen, Hannibal fails at pets, Man's Best Serial Killer, Morbid Yet Adorable, Other, Poor Will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 02:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Will finds a stray cat at one of his crime scenes, the allergy-afflicted profiler brings her to Dr. Lecter to watch for the night. It seems like Hannibal's worst nightmare... until a kitchen intruder proves Man's Best Serial Killer may be the doctor's perfect match.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sink Your Claws In

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to littlelostsputnick for this hilarious prompt, and for a year's worth of Hannibal headcanons.

Will is in the barn when he hears it. Muffled, persistent. A scratching sound. A soft mewling.

At first he thinks he’s hearing things. It’s not uncommon, these days, for him to lose time and add sensation, to drown hours in the space of a second and plant sounds where they don’t belong. Thick roots burrowing into the dirt, tangled in things he can no longer bear to imagine.

But Beverly cocks her head, her eyes twitch toward him, and he knows she hears it too.

She leans forward, whispering so Jimmy and Brian can’t hear. “I think there’s an animal over there,” she hisses cospiratorially, and nods to the corner, behind a pile of logs. She looks around the barn, at the horses in their stables, the cows in their pens. The body in front of them, strewn with chicken bones, stuck with feathers dipped in blood. “You know, a... not-this-kind of animal. Like a puppy, maybe?”

Will closes his eyes, rubs his temples. Grimaces. His hair tickles his neck, like fingers prickling his spine. Like running your hand on a raven's wing. “Could you...” He glances longingly at the corner. “Would you mind getting...”

Beverly grins. “C’mon losers,” she calls, and in two swift motions grabs the tech boys by their lab coats and hauls them up. “You know the drill. Resident psychic needs his privacy.” She gives him a light nudge on the shoulder, shoves them out the door, and closes it over Jack’s impatient face.

Will is alone with the sound.

He wishes he could breathe in without smelling the body, could close his eyes without the slate wiping itself clean and painting pictures only Jack wants to see. He wishes they all weren’t waiting for him to dig his fingers into a killer’s mind.

But he’ll settle for whatever’s in that corner. Something alive. Something that needs his help. Something to get him away from what’s waiting in front of him.

He edges over to corner, careful to keep his eyes averted from the corpse at the barn’s center. Some sort of bastardized vodou ritual, from the looks of things. Another man taking something sacred and twisting it into his own profane. He takes a moment to wipe off his glasses on his shirt, run his sweaty palms down his jeans, before lifting the first log.

“Hey, little guy,” he says. The whimpering grows louder, and the scratching more frantic. Will struggles to keep the bile from his throat, to set his tone even, knowing a dog will sense the moment it slips on the knife-edge of panic. “What are you doing back —”

He looks down. He sees it.

“Oh no,” he says. “Not that.”

****

There is an order to Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s life.

Patients come on time, or they are removed from his roster. Passerby are polite, or they are removed from polite society. All things are in order, all things are in his control, and all things — if possible — are exquisite.

Is is near unforgivable, then, that Will Graham should come not only as he is about to gather supplies, not only with a runny nose and reddened eyes and a throat constantly catching, but carrying what Hannibal can only hope is an empty box under his arm.

“Ah neeb your helb.” It’s less a voice than an effusion of phlegm. Will’s eyes, near-shut, are rimmed in red, and his nose is raw. He holds in a sneeze. Hannibal can feel his world closing in around him.

“Will, no.” He eyes the box, smoothing down his vest, hoping the disgust in his face may be interpreted as simple misgiving. “My home is no place for an animal. Surely there’s a shelter that can take him, until he finds a proper home?”

“Her,” Will corrects thickly. He lifts the box up and sets it on the kitchen counter, dirt from the bottom pressing into the granite. Hannibal wills his lip not to curl.

“She’s not bery fredly.” Will is sleepless, desperate and absolutely miserable. An intoxicating sight, on any other occasion, but here merely deeper cause for alarm. “I don’ thing a shelder would tage her, and I’b allergic doo ca— ca—”

“Yes.” He hands him a box of scented tissue, hoping to postpone the inevitable. “I can see.”

Hannibal looks Will over, half-affectionate, half-exasperated. He owes Will something, some way to cement the tentative friendship they’ve begun and continue to lift him above suspicion. He knows this, and has even come to be intrigued by it — like a massive web, each tangled link drawn to him as a center, his Abigail and his Alana and his dear, dear Will. He suspects that doing this favor is another way to establish normalcy — surely people like small animals? he has never been sure — and appalled by the effect this normalcy might be.

And then Will says “Loogk,” and lifts the thing out of the box.

She is a beautiful kitten, for all that she’s small and underfed. Her dirty coat is silver, almost bluish in the dim light of the kitchen, clawed fists scrabbling at Will’s hands and digging into the meat of his palm. Hannibal imagines artwork, and carving knifes, and the smooth polish of wood floors.

“Will...” he begin softly, almost caressing the coming refusal, when the cat becomes aware of him, lifts her head, and meets his eyes with hers.

They’re green, bright green, not the limpid blue pools he’d been stomaching himself for. They stare at him, unblinking, as the kitten lifts her nose in the air and, delicately, sniffs. Then she retracts her claws, curls her tail around the back of Will’s hand, and becomes suddenly, totally still.

“See? Dat’s de first dime she’s been calmb all day.” Will gives Hannibal a pleading look. “You hab a good effect on her.”

Hannibal sees, with a kind of horror, that a strand of silver hair has already made it onto his sleeve.

****

The first thing Hannibal does is shut the doors to his dining room and find a way to fence off the kitchen.

He goes out for the pet barrier, cat firmly shut in the bathroom cupboard, and all he gains is three wasted hours, a twisted finger lodged painfully in the plastic rings of the door, and the rank liver of a shop assistant who asked, smirkingly, whether a man so well-dressed was really cut out to be a “pet person.”

One proferred beer later, he watches stoically as Dr. Bloom assembles the door in minutes, finishes her drink, pats him on the shoulder, and flees into the dander-less snow.

“I am a master chef, and an exceptionally skilled artist,” he says to his empty living room. It is stripped of artwork, its table and chair legs carefully wrapped in cheesecloth. “I am a world-renowned psychiatrist. I am a god in the darkness.”

The cat gives a delicate yawn.

****

Disappointment, at first. To find this kind of Human looking down at her.

Had hoped to find Meat, some piece of the Ground Birds behind. A quick end if nothing else, if the Other Meat had come.

But a hand, rough. Dripping sweat and need. Hairs and pheromones scrabbling across skin. Yearning. Malleable.

Dog.

Panic, then. Fear. Still small, still weak, still clawing. But enough to know the Human wanted. Wanted her safe. Wanted her gone. Amusing to snuffle against him. To drink his anxiety. To feel his senses rankle at her mark. To rake him, testingly, to see what amusing noises he might make.

Darkness. Smaller Home, with a Lid. Claws meeting Not Wood, Man Scents and Fish Smell and Movement and Darkness.

But now, something new. An interesting Den. Could taste it, in the oil of the air. Death here. Entertainment, perhaps. Food.

And this one. Now. A new scent. A Human that smelled like Cat.

****

He hears the scratching coming from the kitchen and decides to tell Will the cat died in the night.

Almost beautiful, the calm that filters over him, all the anger of the previous hours dissolving in an ecstasy of merciless determination. The feeling he’d been craving all day, the feeling robbed him in a subpar kill and a night inspecting floorboards for scratchmarks, and he feels a surge of gratitude to the accursed creature giving him this gift again, as he does with all the others. To let him taste the taut beauty of life through the potency of approaching death.

But when he reaches the entrance to the kitchen, she is waiting outside of it, muscles tensed, eyes bright in the darkness, tail twitching with all the immediacy of hunger and need.

A mouse. A mouse in his kitchen. Vermin in his precious, private stores.

He looks down at the small, murderous bundle of claws and fur. He notes how clean she is now, poised. How not one scratch has made it onto his floors, not one hair appeared on the furniture in his sitting room. How familiar the smell is radiating off of her, the tension of her coiled back, the lithe half-movements of a creature ready to spring.

“Katė,” he murmurs. “žudyti.”

In one leap the infernal barrier is forgotten, and a petrified squeal, more pig than rat, is heard from the corner stores. Hannibal tilts his head back, eyes closed, nostrils dilated. Listens to the few pathetic scrabblings of the creature as the cat lets it go, brings it back, lets it go again, snatches it back. The smell of rodent fear redolent in the air. A soft, definitive crunch.

Hannibal looks down. She's waiting for him, the flesh swaying gently in the vise of her needle-like teeth. She edges to the side, past the carpet where such a thing would stain. Places the bloodied animal on the newspaper of her bed.

Hannibal reaches down, picks her up by the scruff of the neck, settles her into the crook of his arm. She nestles among the velvet folds of his robe. Purrs.

A green-eyed Russian blue, he thinks. Exquisite.

“I understand,” he tells the kitten, absently scratching her ears. “ I shall call you Kolya.”


End file.
